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September 25, 2017

So I've gotten around to checking out the new Star Trek: Discovery. As a
long-time Star Trek fan, I'm always open-minded about new additions to the canon
and willing to give each of them a chance. TOS is what set the wheels in motion,
and TNG brought Star Trek TV back from the dead. DS9 was an okay effort at the
start, but weakened when it started running afoul of the franchise's core
message. Voyager, despite having a great cast, was awful. And then Enterprise
showed up and started messing with established canon, while also managing to be
pretty terrible. It too had a solid cast, but they just couldn't save it.

Now we have Discovery, the newest addition to the TV lineup. And boy, is it bad.
It seems like everything post-TNG is a race to the bottom and new shows are
trying desperately to beat the previous iterations for the title of "Worst Star
Trek Series." This may sound like "back in my day" crotchety complaining, but
let me explain things.

As I said earlier, Enterprise was the beginning of playing fast and loose with
the canon, shoehorning a previously unknown Starship Enterprise into the line
and showing off advanced technology 100 years before the original series.
Discovery doubles down on this trend, with super advanced computers and tech in
every corner of the ship, while still taking place 10 years before Kirk's five
year mission. LCARS computer sounds from TNG are all over the place, often used
incorrectly no less - long before LCARS was ever created. TNG rank pips on the
uniform insignia, nearly a century before rank pips were even a thing. (TOS
displayed the rank on the uniform's shirt cuffs, which mostly carried into the
first 6 movies.) Holographic communications all over the ship, which were first
introduced as a new novelty during DS9. It's a mess.

Next we have what this series calls Klingons. I say that, because aside from a
few pieces of trivia here and there - mentions of Kahless, cloaking technology,
etc. - Discovery manages to get absolutely everything wrong about the Klingons.
Apparently they're Ancient Egyptians now. From the clothing (a mere decade
before Kor and Koloth, this is how Klingons supposedly looked?)
to the culture (since when do Klingons mummify their dead and put them in
sarcophagi for storage?), next to nothing about these Klingons resembles
anything we already know about them. Even TNG made some effort to carry
forward a handful of the legacy features of Klingons after drastically changing
their look, and Roddenberry had said that TNG's Klingons looked like what TOS's
Klingons would have looked like if they had the budget. Discovery has no excuse
for these drastic changes.

There are other problems. Interstellar mind-melds. Arguments with computers
about ethics. Lack of division colors in the uniforms. Transporter speed. Court
Martial proceedings with unnecessary dramatic lighting. But the most important
problem is that Star Trek has lost its heart. The original series and TNG were
the best of Trek because they were shows about the characters. These days,
that's secondary to flashy effects and big-budget action. People like to defend
shows like Discovery and Enterprise by saying that the technology gap between
them and TOS is no big deal and making a show with a TOS level of technology
wouldn't work today. Not true. Not only could you easily fit era-appropriate
tech into the '60s visual style of TOS, there's also the notion that if you have
great stories, it doesn't matter if the technology looks dated. If
you're using fancy effects to carry the show, it's going to fail. And that's one
reason why Enterprise barely lasted 4 years on TV before being canceled.

Discovery can make all of the references to past shows that it wants, but at the
end of the day, it just isn't Star Trek.

February 10, 2015

I need to start out by saying that I've been a Netgear fan for a really long
time, having purchased several of their products in the past. But while Netgear
used to make really solid products that worked well, they've fallen into the
trap of making terrible products that can't stand up to even the most basic of
usage scenarios.

My love affair with Netgear began to fade shortly after purchasing several
WNCE2001s and having them destroy my network. (You can read my review on those
here.) I chalked that
up to them being an old and discontinued product, but it started to chip at my
confidence in Netgear's products. Then came this thing, the FVS318N firewall.

The firewall I had before this one was the FVS318G, and it was excellent - so
much so that I immediately wanted something newer in the Netgear ProSafe line
when it was time for me to replace it. And lo, I found the FVS318N and ordered
it without hesitation.

My first mistake.

The firewall arrived, and I updated the firmware and re-entered my network
configuration on the new device. (I should note here that I'm a full-time 15+
year IT security professional, so I know my way around firewalls and the like.)
For the first day, the firewall worked great. The speeds were so much faster
than I've been used to and it was a pleasure. But after the first 24 hours or
so, the connection through the firewall became horribly unstable. 33% of
connections began straight up failing due to random connection resets. I decided
it was time to contact Netgear Support.

My second mistake.

I opened my support ticket on December 5, 2014. The first-level technician did
some basic troubleshooting and had me downgrade the firewall's firmware to its
factory state, then we upgraded to the penultimate firmware version to see if it
was an issue with the latest firmware. Nothing helped, so the issue was
"escalated" to engineering, who promptly came back and said that it was a DNS
problem. A terrible diagnosis, as this kind of failure has nothing to do with
DNS. (DNS doesn't interrupt existing connections, it serves to translate
hostnames to IP addresses so that the initial connection can be made.) I
followed their ridiculous recommendation and told them that wasn't the problem.
They also asked me to spin up a syslog server and have the Firewall log to it,
so I did that too.

That was on December 17, and that's pretty much where this issue stalled. I
re-upgraded the firmware to more reliably reproduce the problem, and continued
logging to the syslog server. On the 18th, I uploaded the logs to Netgear's
support portal after reproducing the issue. On the 19th it was again "escalated
to next level support" which is where everything died on their end. I requested
an update on the 23rd and didn't get a response. I requested another update on
January 5, and got no response until January 13, when Netgear requested access
to a host on my network. Actually what they asked for was a host running
Wireshark and PuTTY, at which point I told them I don't have any Windows
machines but that I could give them access to a Linux machine with tcpdump and
ssh available, and I asked if that was acceptable. On January 30 they agreed, so
I immediately provisioned a brand new virtual machine and gave them access as of
February 1.

That's where my ticket hit a brick wall. A week later (Feb 8) I updated the
ticket saying that I hadn't gotten any response from Netgear and I needed an
update because this firewall has crippled my network. I was told "Engineering is
working on it" but the logs on the machine I gave them said otherwise. In fact,
no one other than me had ever even logged into that box. Nobody in Netgear
Engineering was paying attention to this issue at all.

So here we are today. I have a completely unusable firewall, and the company
that makes it has absolutely no interest in fixing it. Additionally, I'm not the
only one with this problem - I provided them several links to places on the
Netgear forums from people who are having the same issue. Google yields even
more people with the problem, and it's been an issue since the firewall was
first released.

So yeah, no more Netgear for me. Ever. I would encourage you to stay away as
well. They make terrible products and they have awful support standing behind
their products. Don't waste your money or your time.

October 21, 2014

There are a lot of guides out there on how to install Mac OS X Yosemite under
VirtualBox, but unfortunately most of them are A) for the developer preview, or
B) for Windows. While most of the steps are pretty much what you need, there are
a handful of missing things that will make the process "Just Not Work" for the
final retail release of Yosemite.

Here's my complete step-by-step guide on how to install Yosemite under
VirtualBox with a Yosemite host.

First thing you'll need to do is download the Yosemite Installer from the
App Store. It will save as "Install OS X Yosemite" in your /Applications
folder.

Now you need to open VirtualBox, but leave your Terminal open because we
aren't done there just yet.

In VirtualBox, create a new VM and name it. ("Mac OS X Yosemite" is
probably a good choice.)

If you can spare it, give the machine 4GB of RAM, otherwise the default
2048 should be fine.

Go ahead and create a 20GB Virtual Hard Drive. Make it a Dynamically
Allocated VDI.

Once the machine has been created, highlight it in the main VirtualBox
window and click "Settings."

In the Settings window under "System > Motherboard" make sure "Chipset"
has PIIX3 selected.

Click over to "Display" and max out the Video Memory.

Now move to "Storage" and choose the optical disc from the "Storage Tree"
menu. (At this point it should be labeled "Empty.")

Next to the dropdown by "CD/DVD Drive" you will see a small CD icon. Click
it, and select "Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file..." then navigate to
yosemitefixed.dmg on your Desktop and select it.

Check the "Live CD/DVD" checkbox, and then click "OK" to close the settings
window.

Start the VM. You won't see an Apple logo while the system boots, but rest
assured the system is starting.

IF YOUR MACHINE DOES NOT START FULLY, you will probably be stuck at an
error that says "Missing Bluetooth Controller Transport." If so, power off the
Virtual Machine, go back to your Terminal and type: VBoxManage modifyvm 'YOUR
YOSEMITE VM NAME' --cpuidset 1 000206a7 02100800 1fbae3bf bfebfbff then
close Terminal and restart the VM.

You should now be at the Welcome screen for the Mac OS X Installer. At this
point you will need to partition your virtual disk image, so you should click
"Continue" which will open the menubar at the very top of the screen.

From the top menubar, select "Utilities" and then choose "Disk
Utility."

Once Disk Utility opens, you will see your VBOX HARDDRIVE in the left side.
Select it, then click the "Partition" tab.

Under "Partition Layout" select "1 Partition." Name it "Macintosh HD" and
use the "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" format. Click "Apply" and then "Partition"
on the dialog that appears.

Quit Disk Utility to return to the OS X Installer, and then install OS X to
the drive partition you just created.

At this point, all you need to do is wait out the install and then once the VM
reboots, you will be presented with the OS X Welcome Screen as if you've just
booted a brand new Mac. Once you've gotten the initial setup finished and you've
finally arrived at your Desktop, I recommend taking a snapshot of the VM, so you
can revert back to your fresh install at any time.